Quotes by Dennis Lehane

We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you. He solemnly made the sign of the cross. But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up? Not on my land, Joe said.But it is not your land. Its Gods. You are renting it. This rum? This life? He patted his chest. We are all just renting from God.

Happiness doesnt lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

And often the worst thing wasnt the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

I believe in God. Maybe not the Catholic God or even the Christian one because I have a hard time seeing any God as elitist. I also have a hard time believing that anything that created rain forests and oceans and an infinite universe would, in the same process, create something as unnatural as humanity in its own image. I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.

Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when wed shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love wed had and those selves wed been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters youd never read again.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

One that society cant forgive, but I can.

hed never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion on the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they this weilded power barbarically so the world would not find them out

Its odd how fast a beautiful woman can turn a guys mind into lint storage. Just by being a beautiful woman.

I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman youd dated in high school— a woman youd loved and lost— danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, lets dream just one more time.

Sympathy’s easy. You have sympathy for starving children swatting at flies on the late-night commercials. Sympathy is easy because it comes from a position of power. Empathy is getting down on your knees and looking someone else in the eye and realizing you could be them, and that all that separates you is luck.

Each day in this country, twenty-three hundred children are reported missing.

...you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into their energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.

It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn’t change back. One second.

Lately, though, hed just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio hed heard years before and hadnt liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other peoples clothes and other peoples hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. Hed gotten to a point where he was pretty sure hed heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadnt seemed fresh the first time hed heard them.Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food.He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.

You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guys leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think theres a difference, like the bankers just doing his job but the loan sharks a criminal. I like the loan shark better because he doesnt pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be where I am sitting right now. Im not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a mens club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kids grades. Die at my desk, and theyll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirts hit the coffin.

The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what shed look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.

Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his fathers pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.